Richard Ben Cramer, 1950-2013

Discussing the passing of Richard Ben Cramer, and the effect of Cramer's What It Takes on political journalism, my man Chuck said that the book was his personal "Catcher In The Rye. I was like Mark David Chapman with it." And then the screen went dark because the Bad Analogy SWAT team rappelled into the studio and hauled him away.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Not, really.

But, holy mother of god, I mean, wow.

I think Bill Burton's still hiding under the desk.

Richard Ben Cramer was a giant of American journalism, and he would have been even if he'd never hung around with Dick Gephardt's high-school classmates or Bob Dole's old running buddies back in Kansas. He won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the Middle East that was as solid and as prescient and as sensitive as any ever produced by that impossible assignment. He came to magazines and he produced a piece on Ted Williams for this joint that can stand with Gay Talese's Frank Sinatra opus as an example of how to craft great journalism out of notoriously difficult subjects. Dozens of people waited years for Joe DiMaggio to call them and bless them with the opportunity to ghost-write his autobiography. Cramer said phooey, went to the primary sources, and produced one of the great biographies of all time. If he'd only done all of that, he'd have been a blessing to the world and an ornament to his craft.

But he also wrote a book about politics.

In the hours since his death, dozens of young political journos have mentioned how What It Takes made them want to be political reporters. (My man Chuck was one of them.) Being of an earlier generation, my seminal political books were largely fiction — The Last Hurrah, All The King's Men and, lest loftily, the Washington thriller genre pioneered by Allen Drury in Advise And Consent and by Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey with Seven Days In May. (The movie versions of both of which hold up ridiculously well — Charles Laughton as the archetypical Southern obstructionist, and Burt Lancaster's seditious, bemedalled General James Mattoon Scott drawn from a sharp script by Rod Serling.) In the next stage, the transformative texts probably were the first two books in the Theodore White Making Of The President series and, then, later, The Selling Of The President by Joe McGinniss, Tim Crouse's masterpiece The Boys On The Bus, and, of course, Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail '72. But it was good to hear that coming to this profession through the work in the profession that came before you is not a dead proposition.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

What It Takes, I read piecemeal. In part, this was because the 1988 presidential campaign was a wretched, trivial affair that I wanted to forget as soon as possible. (The best book on how the system broke down that year is Sid Blumenthal's Pledging Allegiance: The Last Campaign Of The Cold War. The Soviet Empire was falling apart, and we were arguing about saluting the flag. Gah.) In part, this was because Cramer's deeply reported, gorgeously written portraits of each of the contenders all qualified as separate mini-books on their own. I can see, however, the attraction for the generation of reporters who came of age reading it and who, I fear, learned all the wrong things, and then put all the wrong things into practice. If people interpret Richard Cramer's political journalism as the seedbed for Politico, or the psychobabbilicious maunderings of Maureen Dowd, they are doing that work, and its author, a great disservice.

If you read What It Takes all the way through, you see that, unlike much of the personality-driven triviality that's drowning political journalism, Cramer had a larger, and more important point. There was a reason he drew such vivid and carefully nuanced profiles of all the candidates that year. It was to give you a sense that the system we have allowed to develop by which we pick a president also is designed to grind into mass-produced sausage the human beings who step into it. That was serious work. (It also was how Cramer was able to suss out the truly malignant effect of Lee Atwater — and, by extension, his ideological descendants — would have on our politics going forward. If you read Cramer on Atwater, nothing about the Arkansas Project should have surprised you.) Unfortunately, too many of the people who claim to have come to the job of reporting our politics through his work have sold themselves on the idea that the personal details are the sine qua non of their jobs. (Hence, Politico.) Or that there is something politically insightful in every personal detail and in whatever shiny trash the reporter can make of them (la Dowd). At the end of the segment, my man Chuck recouped big time by saying that he thought a lot of his colleagues "took all the wrong lessons" from the work of Richard Ben Cramer.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.